Lawrence manager tells council government is not to blame for hefty taxes

Lawrence Township Municipal Building on Thursday, April 7. 2011. Martin Griff / The Times of Trenton

LAWRENCE — Township Manager Richard Krawczun said this week the municipal government is getting slammed with a disproportionately high share of the blame for tax increases that residents are facing.

In a presentation to council on Tuesday, Krawczun said the township collects far less in taxes from residents for its own purposes than for schools or the county, which set their own budgets and rely on the township to collect taxes for them.

“This is not a Lawrence Township or a Mercer County problem, this is a problem that exists throughout the state,” he said. “There is constant talk about tax reform, and one of the ways to address tax reform is to be fully objective and understand how tax dollars are raised and how tax dollars are spent.”

Residents of Lawrence will see an average $80 increase in the municipal portion of their annual tax bill, whereas the average increase in the school tax portion will be $97, according to draft budgets not yet adopted.

On Tuesday, Krawczun presented five years of data showing the town’s struggle to keep taxes down.

“I keep being asked, what have we been doing, and frankly, there has been some criticism of me of what I haven’t been doing. I want to point this out to illustrate the difficulty,” he said.

In Lawrence, municipal taxes make up 21 percent of households’ tax bills, while county taxes are 27 percent and school taxes are 53 percent, according to Krawczun’s presentation.

“You can see that 79 percent of the taxes collected are spent by the other two taxing districts,” he said.

In 2012, the town’s $44 million budget was funded in part by a $23 million tax levy. Krawczun compared that figure with the school district’s much larger levy of almost $60 million.

The county’s tax collections in Lawrence were also much higher than the township’s, at $30.7 million, he said.

Bogging down things more and causing more expense for the town were the payments for tax refunds and credits, following appeals by Lawrence property owners.

In 2012, about $1.16 million was paid out in tax credits and refunds. Of that, Krawczun said, $609,000 applied to school taxes, $315,000 to county taxes and $238,000 to municipal taxes.

“So of that total amount, over $900,000 is attributable to the other two entities,” he said. “But yet we are required to pay the full amount.”

Over five years, the town refunded or gave credits for more than $7 million in revenue, Krawczun said.

Of that, he said, $4.1 million was associated with the schools, $2.1 million with the county and $1.6 million with the municipality.

He said it was an astounding cost for the township to absorb.

Council member Cathleen Lewis and the rest of the council expressed concern about the numbers, and gratitude toward Krawczun for breaking down the data and presenting it to the public.

“He’s raised my blood pressure in the way it gets raised every time we look at these numbers,” Lewis said. “I think the residents really need to understand where those monies are going.”

Council member Michael Powers said he hoped that the ongoing property revaluation, which may result in tax adjustments for many households, would prevent the huge amount of appeals and refunds paid in the future.

Lawrence Township schools business administrator Tom Eldridge said the district has also tried to make its budget process clear.

“People in general do realize that the school district is the recipient of the largest share of taxes, and that’s why it was important to break it down in the simplest terms,” he said.
On Tuesday night the school board approved a preliminary budget proposal of about $67 million, he said.